Mandel and Camatte reject all technological hope, including hope in collapse-driven revolution.

Evidence

Today, some Marxists see this subsumption (as Marx calls it above) as a necessary point forward to a future communism, arguing for the necessity of complete technological alienation to intensify the contradictions inherent to capital, provoking rupture and collapse. Things must get worse—possibly to the point of a total, dystopian collapse of society—before they get better, this line of thinking goes. Others see the emergence of a mode of production that cannot truly be called “capitalism.” Mandel and Camatte see something different. Faith in technology—and the incorporation of life into a technological mode of production—leads to the perpetual wasting of human labor, the generation of extreme irrationality and fatalism, obscuring the points at which we could intervene to stop it. Any hope in technology is misguided. This includes not only the banal belief that technology will save us but also includes the hope that the collapse of capital and society will lead, somehow, to a revolution spurred by perpetually increasing precarity, instability, and crisis. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 53

Categorization

• XREF: The rejection of ‘accelerationist’ collapse-toward-revolution counters a live strand of Marxism relevant to the reader’s labor-theory analysis.